1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to disaster recovery planning in computing systems and in particular to automate planning for end-to-end disaster recovery of enterprise applications.
2. Background Information
In computer processing systems, application downtime results in financial losses for enterprises. While disaster recovery (DR) planning is one of the most critical tasks for administrators managing storage, databases, servers, virtual machines, it is the least automated and a fairly uncoordinated process, relying on error prone and suboptimal techniques. DR planning at individual layers such as storage does not take into account overlapping replication functionality of other layers such as databases and virtual machines. For example, synchronous replication at the storage controller level can be replaced by database-level synchronous replication which provides an additional benefit of transaction integrity at the expense of a significantly higher network bandwidth overhead.
Also, within a particular layer, the selection of the replication technology is dependent on its operational details, cost, interoperability requirements, and existing infrastructure. Finally, the opportunity to satisfy composite requirements by combining technologies of individual layers is not available.
End-to-end DR planning is a complex manual process today involving a highly skilled group of application, database, storage administrators or consultants. A typical real-world DR deployment is a combination of technologies at the server-level, network-level and storage-level. For example, a common configuration is server-level replication combined with synchronous data replication in a database combined with asynchronous inter-site data replication in the enterprise class storage controllers.